


Ease my troubled mind

by StarStruckMadness



Category: Smallville
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode Fix-it, Episode Related, Episode: s03e09 Asylum, First Kiss, Hallucinations, M/M, Panic Attacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 23:31:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17693249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarStruckMadness/pseuds/StarStruckMadness
Summary: At the end of S03E09 Asylum, when Clark goes to the Talon to Lana's Welcome Back party, he realizes he doesn't really want to be there. His super speed takes him to the mansion. Where he can't find Lex. Things happen.





	Ease my troubled mind

What was he doing here? He knew Lana didn’t really want to see him. She had made that clear. And he himself didn’t really want to be here, either. The feeling of being in the wrong place only grew stronger when he saw Chloe, Lana and Pete standing together and chatting, not a care in the world, no dangers, no meteor freaks around them. No aliens, either. They didn’t really need him, did they? Chloe couldn’t get over the fact that he didn’t have any feelings for her, Pete was burdened with keeping his secret and Lana… When she moved in his general direction, he felt hope flare up in his chest. But nothing could have prepared him for the moment their eyes met. 

Clark had never known any real pain, apart from his encounters with kryptonite and the few times he’d been stripped of his powers. The way Lana looked at him in that very moment, he could have sworn he’d understood what pain was. She tried a weak smile to cover up what really went on inside her head, but Clark saw it in her eyes. One moment she was moving, carefree and smiling. The next moment, when her gaze landed on him, she seemed to have stopped breathing, frozen in fear. She was afraid of him. Even though she really knew next to nothing at all. How would she feel about him if she saw the whole picture? Would she run screaming in the other direction, never to be seen or heard from again?

He wanted to go to her, to say sorry, to ask how she was doing. But Lana took the next possible out of having to face him at less than an arm’s length. Clark couldn’t even recall the name of the blond girl that caught Lana up in a chat and led her away from him. And Lana went with her, all too willingly. Feeling a little like the walls were closing in on him, he made the conscious decision that he had nothing to do here. Turning around he started to make his way through the mass of people in the Talon, towards the exit. He needed to get out of there, now!

In the blink of an eye he found himself standing outside the mansions front doors. And almost at the same time he came to realize that all day long he couldn’t shake the sight of that blissfully vacant look in Lex’s eyes. His best friend wasn’t alright, he wasn’t cured. There hadn’t been anything to cure him of, except for an unknown amount of time being dosed with hallucinogens. They had electrocuted him! Multiple times! And Clark hadn’t made it in time to save him. But he was there now, that had to account for something. He needed to see him, hold him, feel his physical presence and to make sure that Lex was out of there.

He went in through the door, down the hallway, into Lex’s office, and found himself standing alone in the large study. No one was there, the only sound the crackling of the fire in the fire place. No Lex. Clark had never felt cold before, not at the lowest of temperatures in Kansas. But at that moment he felt a sensation he could subconsciously only call freezing. It came over him in a second, rolled down his spine and settled in the tips of his fingers and toes, which he lost all and any feeling in. Was this how people felt in the winter? 

He shivered, goose bumps forming on his arms and the hair at the nape of his neck standing on end. He had seen Lex through the large window in the asylum. His body actually, lying on the metal table, diodes still stuck to his temples and literal smoke coming off of his head. In that moment Clark hadn’t felt sadness. He'd felt like a savage. He had wanted to tear through the glass wall and make Lionel Luthor experience what he had done to his only son. He had wanted to sear him to the bone with his heat vision, wanted to tear him apart bit by ugly, evil little bit and then mix his miserable remains with the cow dung his mother used as fertilizer. Then he had taken another look at Lex’s motionless body and had deflated, leaving him standing outside the window feeling nothing. Hollow, empty, numb. Were he to know if he had a soul, he’d had said that it felt as if someone had ripped it out of his torso, like missing a part. 

He had never really needed to breathe, had no need for oxygen whatsoever. But the thought that maybe his best friend hadn’t made it out of Belle Reve had his chest constricting as if someone had wound a kryptonite rope around it and pulled tight. Had he imagined seeing Lex in here earlier, right in this very room? Was that hug just a figment of his tormented missing soul? Wishful thinking? A Hallucination? His very own psychotic break? Was insanity contractible? 

He heard a wheezing sound, then another. He turned around looking for the source, but found himself still all alone in the large study. It took a while for him to realize that he was the one struggling to pull air in. But it felt like his throat was closing up. Had Lex really-... Was he not-? Clark couldn’t even bring himself to finish the thought, as if only thinking it could somehow make it true. His desperate gasping for air morphed into an ugly dry cough that seemed to rattle his entire body at the turn his thoughts had taken. Unable to stay upright, with the cough and the wheezing taking their toll on his physical abilities, he crashed onto his hands and knees and still tried to breathe in air he never before needed.

The sensation of somebody’s hands on his cheeks guiding his face upwards was a welcome break and when he finally looked up into the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen, his struggling seemed to subside. “I’m here, Clark, its ok. I’m right here.” He instantly stopped coughing and wheezing. He stopped trying to breathe in. Lex’s eyes were shimmering in the light of the flickering fire. Little sparks danced in them as if the whole universe of stars had decided to take up residence in those endless pools of quicksilver. And then, as if remembering that not breathing as a living being was generally frowned upon among humans, he sighed and kept reflexively miming what he had come to understand was a normally functioning lung activity.

“Lex?” Clark whispered, voice still raw from his coughing fit.

“Are you alright, Clark? It looked like you were experiencing a panic attack.” 

As if having an out of body experience, Clark found himself watching the scene he was clearly a part of as if standing ten feed to the side of them, Clark still on his hands and knees and Lex kneeling before him with his hands on Clarks face. He’ll later chalk it up to that out of body experience that he could not stop himself from reaching for Lex’s face on his part and planting his lips on those of the young billionaire, eyes closed and all. 

When after what felt like an hour Clark wasn’t watching the scene from the sidelines anymore, he dared to open his eyes, still in lip lock with his best friend. Whose eyes in turn were still wide open, but closed just the moment Clark had chosen to pull back. So he didn’t. The kiss was chaste, nothing but a press of lips on lips, the feeling of a warm pair attached to one’s own. After yet another felt eternity, Clark pulled back slowly and sat back on his heels.

Looking into Lex’s eyes he found himself missing the vibrant endlessness he had seen mere moments ago in them. In its stead there was a livid look in now grey shades of cold concrete. Lex’s kneeling frame collapsed to the side and he covered his mouth with his left hand, gazing absently into the fire with a look that Clark could only interpret as subdued and disappointed.  
“It seems I am not yet entirely cured. The hallucinations were supposed to be gone for good. Or maybe this is but a dream.” Lex murmured as if to no one in particular. 

“Lex.” Apparently Lex’s name was the only thing Clark seemed to be able to utter. And if that was his way of communicating now, he’d make do with it. He’d dealt with bigger issues. He reached out with his right hand and put it onto Lex’s shoulder. “You’re not hallucinating, this is real. I am really here.” With his left hand he gingerly touched Lex’s right cheek, who in turn leaned into the gentle caress.

“You’re warm.” came the soft whisper. 

Clark moved again across the floor, closer still to Lex and pulled him into his arms, encircled him with his legs. Lex snuggled into Clark’s sturdy frame and put his head on the farm boy’s shoulder. 

“This is not a hallucination, Lex. As much as I am embarrassed to admit to it, I did just plant one on you as if I had lost all control over my own body.” Panic attacks, Clark found, were a horrible, terrible thing to experience. They made you do and say even more embarrassing stuff. But Lex’s head on his shoulder felt heavy and anchoring, a confirmation of reality. This was really happening. He was here, with Lex in his arms on the hard wood floor of the study Lex used as an office. He wasn’t in Belle Reve anymore. And Lex was alive and not a vegetable. Maybe not exactly the Lex he’d known before, but still his Lex, his best friend, the guy he had a penchant destroying cars for and saving his life. 

“You really are very warm.” Lex murmured again, nuzzled his face into the crook of Clark’s neck and touched his palm to Clark’s chest, in the general vicinity of where his heart would be. 

After staying like that for a while and just calming down by breathing in the scent of the other, Clark felt Lex’s hand wander upwards, over his shoulder, his neck, to finally land on his cheek. Lex pulled his head up and off of Clarks shoulder and guided his face towards him, slightly to the right and then downwards to meet his own. And Clark found himself kissing Lex for the second time that day. This kiss, as was their first, was still chaste, no hunger or need or fire. Just a press of lips on lips, but not as still as the one before. When this time Lex pulled back, Clark felt a happy little ray of sunshine in his chest, when he saw that the shine had returned to Lex’s eyes. Though, instead of the mysterious infinity, there was something very specific in Lex’s gaze now that he only could wish was something akin to hope.

“Did you mean this?” was Lex’s question.

Clark knew he didn’t need to search for words to answer Lex. Instead he dove down once again and kissed Lex for the third time. This time though, the kiss was way less chaste. Not yet desperate, but maybe a little bit overzealous. As if they were rushing after all the time they had lost, trying to keep up, trying to overtake, and then land back again in that very moment, realizing that they had all the time in the world.

When Clark’s tongue swiped over Lex’s upper lip and caught on the small scar in the middle of it, he couldn’t help but think that it seemed to have a whole other flavor of its own, still tasting like Lex and yet so clearly different, that it was easy to discern not just by touch alone. And when Lex opened up for him, a feeling came over Clark, as if coming back home. Given the last few months, hell, ever since his father told him he was an alien from outer space, Clark had forgotten how it was to truly feel at home. Yet here, on the hard wood floor of the study Lex used as an office, in this overly pompous mansion his best friend lived in, with the young billionaire in his arms, he felt as at home and welcome and right as he had never felt ever before. And even if this was a hallucination, or a fever dream, or even if this was a psychotic break and he was cradling a bundled up blanket in his arms like he had seen his friend do in the barn, then Clark wouldn’t change it for the world. This was their reality. Without spaceships and green meteor rocks. Without evil fathers who were hell-bent on meddling with their sons brains. Without heat vision and symbols in caves. And no murdering wives far and wide. Without car accidents. Without investigations. Without secrets.


End file.
